Thursday, October 8, 2009

Top 10 Roadside Rhymes: Number 1

The Poetry & Popular Culture office has received queries, suggestions, threats, and expressions of both wonderment and dismay about how long it's taken us to reveal what is, in our humble estimation, the Number One Roadside Rhyme in America. Over the past few weeks, as we've constructed our list of the Top Ten Roadside Rhymes, we've parsed the poetry of John Deere and explored the implied rhyming of Frankie Doodle's restaurant. We've debated the ecological implications of what it means to "Shield Your Field." Some of us have scanned, some of us have eaten a little crow, and others have stalked out of the office peeved to no end that billboard rhymes like Chase's new retail campaign

Brand SpankingNew Banking

were not even included in the Top Ten while lewd expressions of popular sentiment like Rock Creek, Montana's, "Testicle Festival" managed to make it all the way to Number 2. We've been contacted by everyday folks and even (true fact) by an editor at a commercial press interested in discovering new ways of talking about the poetry of American life.

All of this interest—all of the furor, anticipation, and controversy—is a sign that folks are paying attention to the very literary ways that presumably debased commercial signage is and has been making itself seen and heard, not to mention how characteristics of literary writing are being used to serve the commercial marketplace. Who can deny the appealingly complex pun of "brand spanking" in Chase's four-word poem? The symmetry of its construction? The ways you can read the poem across, down, and diagonally and have it make sense in each direction, as the intersection of four words trope the intersection of two roads but without all the red lights and green arrows? Who knows if the marketing genius behind "Brand Spanking / New Banking" would trace that slogan's impulse back to a passage from Spring and All by highway poet William Carlos Williams. There—putting more space between the capitalized words and the lower-case ones than the current blog interface will allow us to do—Williams wrote:

THE HORSES black &PRANCED white

Now, however, we have reached the end of the Top Ten road, as it were, and we're happy to announce that the Number One Roadside Rhyme in America ...

... is not a rhyme.

You read it correctly. The most literarily dense sign in the U.S. landscape doesn't rhyme at all. It's a complex piece of wordplay, double meaning, and intertextuality. It's more than two words long but not quite three. It's a convenience store division of the Kroger Company that's open 24 hours a day in eight states to best meet your needs. The Number One Roadside Rhyme in America is

Loaf 'n Jug

We here at the Poetry & Popular Culture office have never even been in a Loaf 'n Jug, but consider, to begin with, what the company does with two and one-third words. At first reading, one reads the sign as an announcement—listing two iconographic products of the American convenience store and the bare necessities of bodily nourishment: bread and milk. The sheer fact that the sign communicates "milk" despite the fact that few people buy milk by the "jug" any more suggests how deeply it's tapping into the social fabric of American English.

But Loaf 'n Jug doesn't just pair two nouns together the way a less accom- plished brand name like Kum & Go links two verbs. That's because the word "Loaf" in Loaf 'n Jug can be read as both noun and verb—a measure of bread and a style of relaxation. This is in fact the double appeal and double promise of this highway-based convenience store: it provides food and a break from the weariness of the road. Here, you can buy a loaf, and you can loaf around.

But that double appeal and the double signification of "loaf" as it functions simultaneously as noun and imperative verb causes linguistic trouble for the rest of the sign, for once we read "loaf" as a verb, we're encouraged to read "jug" as a verb as well—only to realize that we can't in fact "jug." That is, the sensical, parallel linking of two nouns ("loaf" and "jug") implicitly promises that we can similarly link the verb "loaf" with the verb "jug," only to then break that promise by the almost avant-garde non-sense of "jug." Attempting to make sense of what "jug" means as a verb (is it past tense of "do a jig"? the past tense of some imaginary verb "jag"?) proves increasingly frustrating, which may in fact be part of the point. The store, which aims to keep us (and our wallets) inside as long as possible, initiates that process of entrapment by getting us tangled up in the hermeneutics of its sign before we even hit the parking lot. If you doubt the viability of this reading, go check out your Oxford English Dictionary, which informs us that in the latter half of the 1800s "jug" was, in fact, used as a verb. What did it mean? It was slang for "To shut up in jail; to imprison." Fishermen know the term jig in this sense as well, as it's a method of catching fish.

But that's not all. What landed the non-rhyming "Loaf 'n Jug" at the position of Number One Roadside Rhyme is not just the poetics of linguistic entrapment by highway "convenience" stores, but the literary history it also pulls into its orbit, beginning with that most American of loafers, Walt Whitman, who very nearly begins "Song of Myself" with the lines

I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

We here at Poetry & Popular Culture are particular fans of those lines, and so, admittedly, we are predisposed to see them in more places than many other readers are. What cemented our belief that this sign is in conversation with the history of American poetry, however, is that second word "jug," for like "loaf," "jug" has particularly strong literary associations. After its dominant meaning as a measure of milk (or whiskey), "jug" may be most familiarly understood as the sound a nightingale makes—a sound we know most from T.S. Eliot's modernist epic The Waste Land. Consider lines 100-104, for example:

... yet there the nightingaleFilled all the desert with inviolable voiceAnd still she cried, and still the world pursues,'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

And just about one hundred lines later (203-206) we come across:

Twit twit twitJug jug jug jug jug jugSo rudely forc'd.

Some words appear in poems and go on to have happy social lives almost completely separate from those poems, but the words "loaf" and "jug" are not two of them. Like "urn," "brigade," "metro," or "deferred," we can't use "loaf" and "jug"—especially in conjunction with each other and in such a way that calls attention to how densely they signify—without that literary history being present as well. Using that history, Loaf 'n Jug creates a universe for itself and beckons us to enter, promising milk and bread for the body, relaxation for the mind, and poetry for the soul. Once we're inside, the restrooms are dirty, the light is artificial, the bread is stale, and the milk is overpriced. If that's not a modernist epic—even if it's only two and one-third words long—then we don't know what is.

Postscript — Added October 13, 2009

Poetry & Popular Culture is back to report that the nets of intertextuality cast by Loaf 'n Jug spread much further than we first thought! Over the past week, we've been contacted by two separate people on two separate occasions—Rachel Blau DuPlessis over at Temple, and Gail Eifrig, this writer's favorite English teacher from undergraduate school—both of whom have tracked "Loaf 'n Jug" beyond the modernist pale of T.S. Eliot and into the popular consciousness via Edward Fitzgerald's English translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In Section 11 of Fitzgerald's first edition, we read:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness—And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Fitzgerald tinkered with the stanza, however, and by the fifth edition, it read (as Section 12):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness—Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Thanks, Rachel and Gail, for taking P&PC further into this Wilderness. If only Loaf 'n Jug were Paradise enow!

4 comments:

I guess I was always intrigued by the Kum & Go because it is impossibly to decide whether one is actually kumming or going. The Loaf & Jug makes more sense to me because it speaks to the space between kumming and going.

Interesting post, and, yes, a curious name for a roadside emporium. As a verb following 'loaf', 'jug' might suggest 'chug' (as in 'chugging a beer'). There is also of course another meaning to 'jug'(s) plural: breasts.

About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

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